Varina

“When V finally made it back to Natchez in March, sort of engaged to Jeff—but more on that later—she asked around about Pemberton’s dollar worth, describing in general a bondman of his qualification—his experience, his subtlety, his mannerly way of communicating, his skill in navigating the gulf between owners and workers. She omitted his literacy and his love of newspapers, which might have skewed the results. Estimates were, Pemberton would cost as much as the house a blacksmith or baker or milliner lived in, maybe even as much as Jeff’s finest thoroughbred.”  (p. 101)

 “V pulled her little weapon out and then realized the ammunition was packed away in a trunk, since she hadn’t anticipated needing to kill herself in Charlotte.” (p. 61)

“You don’t get to choose who you outlive…” (p. 333)

I’ve always been a little fascinated by Varina Davis, second wife of Jefferson Davis and the Confederacy’s only First Lady, because I had read somewhere that she had been buried with military honors. The gesture seemed so emblematic of the strangeness of civil war—after forty years, it seemed better to honor a rebel’s wife than to run the risk of being accused of rudeness toward an old lady. Apparently I wasn’t alone. Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, has written a character study of Varina Davis that stands as one of the best recent works of American historical fiction.

I ordinarily harrumph when a novel moves around in time—some dour element of my psyche thinks stories should be told from beginning to end straight through—but Frazier deftly alternates between Varina’s young womanhood, as she finds her way in the roles of political wife and plantation mistress; her old age in New York, gently but insistently confronted by a grown African-American man she took in as a boy during the war; and her harrowing middle years, marked by a pell-mell flight from fallen Richmond with her children and a motley band of helpers. (One of Varina’s most charming traits is her calmly repeated assertions that she and her children could have escaped the wreckage of the Confederacy and gotten to Cuba had they not waited for her husband and the dregs of the rebel cabinet.) The result is a profoundly effective character study of a friendly, fun-loving introvert; an intelligent woman who winds up studying the Icelandic sagas as the result of a prank; and a figure who understands the moral complexity of her own position: she disliked slavery, but never condemned it when it mattered… not that it would have done any good.

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Merry Mary Chesnutt, kind Julia Grant, and swashbuckling Sam Houston grace the pages as real-life figures brought to historical life, but Varina’s most compelling interlocutor is James Blake, a black schoolteacher who is almost certain he’s the African-American child who fled Richmond with her. Long after the war, in the North, the two speak very nearly as equals. Blake, a fictional character as an adult but based on an actual child, partly serves as a proxy for the modern reader, but has his own questions—did Varina, whom he remembers as a maternal figure from childhood and whose company he enjoys, own him? She can’t answer, at least in part because she was never wholly sure—that’s just how things were.  k

Varinaby Charles FrazierEcco/Harper Collins

356 pages; hardcover

$27.99